Shoulder Gets Colder for al-Jazeera

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite television channel that has gotten a chilly reception in the U.S. for its war coverage, is finding that the spring weather gets cooler by the day.

The Qatar-based news operation has long been a sore point with the White House, which has accused it of running coverage that is biased against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But now, according to recent news reports, Al-Jazeera is coming under scrutiny from American businesses as well. Two events this week highlight the controversy.

Al-Jazeera, which had used Internet services firm Akamai (AKAM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) to help host its online presence, said Akamai had ceased working with it, according to a report Friday in the The New York Times.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with al-Jazeera to understand the issues they are having distributing their Web sites," an Akamai spokesman told the Times. "We ultimately decided not to continue a customer relationship with al-Jazeera, and we are not going to be providing them our services."

In addition, al-Jazeera told The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday that both AOL Time Warner's (AOL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) America Online unit and portal operator Yahoo! (YHOO - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) refused to run ads for al-Jazeera's English language Web site, which launched late last month.

An AOL spokesman said that the online service generally does not run advertisements for competitors of its content partners, such as CNN and ABCNews.com.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said that the company hadn't been able to confirm that any such refusal had taken place at Yahoo!.

But the controversy over the channel has been building. Last week, the New York Stock Exchange confirmed it had revoked al-Jazeera's broadcasting privileges. More recently, members of the administration including Secretary of State Colin Powell took exception with the channel's coverage, contending that al-Jazeera's coverage of the war is consistently biased against the U.S. and its allies regardless of the actual news.